One right we must never lose is the right to bear arms because it is that right which protects all other rights. It is not because we are barbarians or hunters, and is not solely to protect our life and property from other citizens. As drastic as it sounds, our right to bear arms is mainly to protect ourselves from the potential tyranny of our own government, as a last resort. It is no wonder that governors are constantly changing the language and steering the discussion to be about hunting (as if hunting, in any way, compares to the horrific nature in which we otherwise breed our food). Or the discussion becomes about crime, even though most gun crimes are done with illegally owned guns.

We do have mechanisms built into the government such as checks and balances that generally keep legislators in check, but they can and will be bypassed by a determined government (such as the supreme court’s ruling that the government can fine us for not purchasing health insurance). It would only be as a very last resort that anyone should lift their arms against the government. But many governments have devolved into tyrannical ones, and there is nothing about our ever-growing United States government that tells me it isn’t a possibility with ours at some point in the indefinite future.

In a 2008 Democratic Presidential Debate in Philadelphia, PA, our current president, Barack Obama, said, “As a general principle, I believe that the Constitution confers an individual right to bear arms. But just because you have an individual right does not mean that the state or local government can’t constrain the exercise of that right, in the same way that we have a right to private property but local governments can establish zoning ordinances that determine how you can use it.” And then he goes on to talk about people’s nostalgia for hunting.

First of all, property zoning laws are counterproductive. And his opinion also goes sharply against the sentiment of our founders. In June of 1776, during the constitutional debates, Thomas Jefferson said, “No man shall ever be debarred the use of arms. The strongest reason for the people to retain the right to keep and bear arms is, as a last resort, to protect themselves against the tyranny in government.” The discussion at the time was mainly focused around that sentiment.

More recently, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton have used every “opportunity”–every newsworthy gun crime–to push gun control, instead of addressing the important issues at steak in our increasingly dangerous world.

Is it any wonder that the very people who seek more and more power and control over our lives are usually the strongest gun control advocates?

It is a an emotion-driven platform with no critical examination of potential consequences. For example, bad guys get guns no matter what the law is. And when they strike, especially in public places like schools, most level headed people wish that the good guys were also armed at that moment.

Many are also emotionally driven to believe the government’s overreaching policies actually exist to help us, in general, as if we are helpless otherwise. We are not children of the state. We are adults who have hired – and continually pay – the state to protect us.

In the case of a government who has completely overstepped its bounds and evolved into a tyrannical one, then unfortunately the only way to regain our freedom is for the might of the people to overwhelm the might of the state. A government will tread much more carefully when its citizens are armed.

In every dictatorship the first thing that happens is that gun ownership is outlawed so that the general populace can no longer defend itself. For instance, before the Nazis began exterminating their Jewish population they needed to disarm them first. An armed populace is the last and most important check on government abuse of individual rights.

In the course of continuing dialog about this most important right, we should never find ourselves drawn into arbitrary talk about which guns are suitable for sport shooting or hunting because those issues are unrelated to our constitutional right to keep and bear arms. We should never cave into arguments about gun control for law abiding citizens, as a result of gun crime.

Not everyone needs to bear arms; only those who feel comfortable doing so. I don’t personally own a gun. But we should all be well trained in how to handle a gun, whether or not we actually own one, and informed of the current laws so as to use them correctly and sparingly for the purpose of defense. I also believe that everyone should have training in unarmed self-defense. Disarming someone or disabling them and running away would in most cases be preferable to shooting them, after all.

There is no reason to ever initiate force, nor is it stated in the constitution that we are allowed to. After all, the main point to be made about freedom is the very idea of never initiating force upon another unless one is in fear of being harmed.

The natural world is strikingly beautiful and ornately complex, from the large scale structure of the universe, to the sparkling galaxies, to Earth’s natural landscapes, to the minute detail of our own internal systems. Ancient people, to the best of their ability for logic, attributed the complicated perfection to supernatural forces, and even though we should know better by now, Western religions still generally believe that God deliberately designed and subsequently micromanages life on Earth.

But when we view the observable universe and any parts we can arbitrarily divide it into, it appears to behave as a holistic causal network, free from any bosses, middle management, or other types of micromanagers.

Indeed, pure anarchy is the nature of nature and the reason behind the qualities of nature that any decent human appreciates. Nothing about nature is random or arbitrary or “designed”, and it is because it is all connected. Many different types of experiments in many different fields demonstrate that the universe has its own mechanisms for coalescing and blooming with the complexity that we see all around and within us. Even pure mathematics alone—chaos dynamics—demonstrates this and has opened many people’s eyes to the cleverness and independence of the natural world.

We should also know better by now that people don’t need the “higher power” of government to design and forever micromanage every fragment of society.

Once someone learns even the most rudimentary mathematical explanation of chaos dynamics and begins to see the world through a “fractal geometer’s eye”, it seems like nonsense to assume that the complexity of the world must have been designed, and it seems equally like nonsense that society needs to be “designed”. Being exposed to a tiny bit of the right kind of simple recursive mathematics—or even the right kind of pictures—can go a long, long way for humanity to better grasp the nature of nature, which is forever bubbling with new ideas, is robust, and is creatively self-correcting.

Chaos theory is a mathematical mirror of the natural world that allows us to inspect otherwise unnoticed or under-appreciated dynamical patterns within the complexity and to make important, objective statements about our world and many areas of our lives. It is still highly misunderstood by the general public, partly because of the poor choice in names. “Chaos” was traditionally used to refer to randomness, but by definition there is nothing random in chaos theory, or in any of the patterns it relates to such as fractals or spontaneous orders (the self-organization of large groups of individual agents, whether molecules, birds, people, or galaxies).

We are drenched in a wonderful world of chaos and fractals—mammoth cobwebs of clustering galaxies, infinitesimal webs of neurons zapping data around in our brains, splitting streams of rain running down windshields, bifurcating branches, roots, veins, lightening, river valleys, cascading consequences of human actions, evolving trends in society, and even our meandering moral behavior. Whether a process involves a superabundance of factors like weather or is a simple system like a dripping faucet or pendulum; whether it involves growing and shrinking of gaps like those between cars flowing like waves on the highway or our ever changing knowledge gaps; whether it’s the pattern on a bee’s wing, or the entire swarm, or the forming of a snowflake, or even the sound of a windblown snow flurry—chaos theory peels away any illusion of randomness and reveals the deterministic inner workings of these diverse and interconnected systems. Chaos theory also demonstrates how complexity is never predictable to an exact degree even though it is deterministic.

Our natural world is an intimate mix of unpredictability and order. Things, processes, people, ideas, and even sounds and smells are all connected through a flow of cause and effect, acting and reacting to each other in a constant mingling. So of course it results in many unpredictable outcomes. But for the most part, it is the kind of unpredictability that we shouldn’t worry about so much.

It is actually counter productive to worry about most of the things that we expend so much energy trying to “manage”. It is one thing to manage our individual lives or a system of machines, or a small group such as a family or small business. But managing highly nonlinear things that involve multitudes of individual agents such as societies or ecosystems always backfires to some degree. If we ever do attempt to control the weather it will drive the point home, if we survive to talk about it.

Part of the definition of chaos theory is that it is deterministic. The material world seems to be made of a whacky indeterministic fabric, but at some tiny size, matter and motion pile up to become probabilistic, and at an even larger and more massive scale—although still microscopic from our point of view—the probabilities are so high as to be safely labeled “deterministic”. Things on our level are so deterministic that, in linear systems at least, we can make mindbogglingly accurate predictions.

Yet at the same time, our causal universe is not “predetermined”, which is a word that is often misused, and probably better off not used at all. It makes no sense and serves no purpose even for a Determinist. Even if there was no probability involved (and there certainly is on the level of quarks) and everything was entirely deterministic down to the pinpoint, the universe as a whole is already busy computing its entire self incrementally, laying out the world before us moment to moment, so it has no extra mechanism, let alone purpose, for figuring itself out beforehand. Nor does it have a storage device, let alone an infinitely large storage device, on which to store the data and then from which to replay it so that we can live out or pre-calculated fate. It is the “pre” in predeterminism where this ridiculous misunderstanding stems from.

The conclusion I find so beautiful is that we are all riding a wave-of-determining together, the future still completely undetermined. It is just a much larger scale example of the infinite potential of a quantum particle before a high probability of its potential is collapsed into the “present”, thereby creating only one cohesive “past” as we go. The beauty also lies in the realization that as sentient beings we are consciously carving bits of this wave-of-determining as we go.

It is an amazing and mysterious fact that consciousness exists, and that on this planet somehow humans evolved to become the most self aware of any species. We make deliberate choices and we have a will. Western religion believes that a “soul” is assigned to every human which gives us “free will”, but when someone attempts to define these things, there can only be a breakdown of logic. Most people never attempt the logic but rather adopt a purely emotionally based belief that we have a “soul” and “free will”.

What the ultimate cause or purpose for consciousness existing in the first place is is still a complete mystery, but I imagine that the seed of awareness is somehow woven into the fabric of space-time itself, and that it only takes a special type of complexity, like brains, to focus it enough to become recognizable as “consciousness” to us. So consciousness in that case would be a weak emergence, relative to the complexity of the brains in various species. It is really just a matter of degree how conscious—and therefore self-aware—a life form is.

This view pushes the question of consciousness up against the rest of the great mysteries of the Cosmos, to be included in the same question of the very fabric itself. It is a more logical place for the possible origins of awareness to sit, rather than have it be some sort of strong emergence or “soul”.

Ruling out divine intervention, souls, and extra dimensional explanations means the universe has its own mechanism for consciousness to emerge in complex organisms, and this leads to the least belittling and most empowering image of ourselves possible. In fact, it is awesome to imagine that we naturally evolved to be self aware and to control our destinies simply as a result of what we are. We have all of the things the reader is feeling and has ever felt, and in a strange loop sense, we are the prime initiators of our future. But it has nothing whatsoever to do with the notion of free will as people have come to think of it.

No matter how vast and mysterious as the Cosmos may seem from our point of view, and no matter how lonely we might feel, drifting on the spec we call Earth, we can always feel comforted by the fact that we are that universe; at the very least, tiny conscious pieces of it. We are dynamically changing aspects of the Cosmos just as much as our minds are dynamically changing aspects of our brains. We are made of the wondrous stuff of chemicals that were at first born in the stars, and electrical processes which are fundamental to the universe and nature. And what a cosmic religious feeling it is, to not only have the capacity to look outward and contemplate the universe but to analyze and perhaps someday fully understand the process of our own consciousness.